Blockbuster Scandal: The Obama Administration Weaponized Intelligence for Use Against Trump

Apr 3, 2017

RUSH: I want to circle back here to the story that just won’t go away, and it won’t go away because the Democrats have continued to try to make something out of nothing. Even, you know, that bobblehead figure, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, known affectionately here as the Pencil Neck. This guy last week went out there and said there is evidence of Russian collusion. He went out there and said it in an act of total desperation.

Pencil Neck Schiff

It turns out that Devin Nunes has been running rings around the Democrats, and it looks like they’ve known it all along, and the effort to get Nunes to, quote, unquote, recuse himself as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee or the effort to get rid of him in some other way obviously was undertaken to stop what he is doing and what he is learning. But yesterday on the Sunday shows, Pencil Neck Adam Schiff had to grudgingly admit yet again that there is still not one shred of evidence of any collusion between Trump and the Russians, not a shred.

This is after last week, making the announcement that there was evidence. He just couldn’t help himself. He just couldn’t contain himself. These people are living in a dreamland where they’re hoping that everything they suspect is true, just remains to be found. And he just screwed up and couldn’t help himself and went ahead and announced it when he didn’t have any evidence for it. And it’s a sign of how out of control these people are and unhinged. And I don’t use those terms lightly. I’m not just coming up with descriptive phrases. They genuinely are out of control, and they genuinely are unhinged.

Now, I don’t know if Adam Schiff was embarrassed at all. I don’t know if these people are capable of it. But it helps somebody like him when you know the media is gonna do everything they can to cover for you. But he had to admit, after all of this, folks, after all of this, we now know that Trump has been surveilled for a year. We now know that the Obama administration was responsible for the unmasking. We now know that it was Susan Rice, who lied on five Sunday shows about Benghazi, we know that it was Susan Rice who requested the unmasking of all of these Trump officials.

We now know that what I suspected all along — and I’m not alone — that what was happening indeed did happen, that Russians were surveilled, and that they were talking to Americans. The transcript of the conversations was turned over to people in the Obama administration, such as Mike Flynn, and there are others. And now Susan Rice has been fingered as one of the sources who asked that these people be unmasked so that details of the conversations could be leaked.

And they were leaked. But these people were not targets of the surveillance. They are never to be identified. And we now know that it was the Obama administration — go back to the story where Obama, when he left office, proudly said not one scandal in my administration, scandal free eight years. Not so fast. So Schiff has to eat dirt.

Remember, James Comey testified the Russians just wanted Hillary to lose. So why would they involve Trump in their scheme? The Russians know their calls are monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies. Why would they risk their effort to defeat Hillary by colluding with Trump’s people? If that had come out before the election, she would have won for sure. In fact, everything that was known today has been known for quite a while by people in the intelligence community, by people at the FBI.

But the real scandal here — and it’s becoming increasingly clear — is that the Obama administration weaponized politically our intelligence services against the Republicans and against Trump. I, for one, am not surprised. The Obama administration weaponized everything else to use against the GOP, from the IRS to NOAA to any of these agencies, EPA, involving climate change.

So here’s where we are. In bullet-point fashion, details to come, here is where we are. This is what we know in this developing blockbuster story about the Obama the White House — and it is a story about the Obama White House. It is not a story about Trump and the Russians. We know that the Obama Regime surveilled Trump’s transition team. We know now that the Obama White House unmasked people who were not targets of legitimate surveillance and investigation. We know now that the Obama White House illegal leaked protected information. And, by the way, we knew this long ago.

The media is our source. The Drive-By Media reported all of this. We know that there had to be unmasking. We know that there had to be leaking. The media proudly told us that sources who could not be identified, blah, blah, blah, blah, fed them data. We know now that the media was complicit. And here’s a little detail. Mike Cernovich reports in his story on all this today that Maggie Haberman at the New York Times has known for two days that Susan Rice was behind the unmasking and sat on it to protect President Obama. That’s an assertion made by Mike Cernovich on his web page today.

There are two stories on this — one by Eli Lake at Bloomberg, the other Mike Cernovich, and he specifically claims that Maggie Haberman of the New York Times has known it was Susan Rice for 48 hours and sat on it. Much like Newsweek sat on the story of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, and then eventually spiked the story leading the way to the Drudge Report. We know that Susan Rice lied about her knowledge of this illegal activity in an interview. The Democrats have loved saying, “We’re not doing that! No, no, no. We’re just following the facts. We’re just going with the facts take us.”

They’re not gonna want to go there anymore. They haven’t been doing that anyway. The facts are beginning to roll in, and it turns out that Trump and Devin Nunes are not the story. They are victims of abuse of power by the Obama administration and Democrat collusion with the media. The first the Eli Lake story: “Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel.” Eli Lake is an intel/foreign policy expert/reporter/journalist. He’s a columnist for Bloomberg View. He was the senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast, which is a deranged, lunatic, left-wing site started by Tina Brown.

He covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI. I don’t know how he ended up briefly at The Daily Beast, but he was. His story begins thus: “White House lawyers last month…” Discovered last month! White House lawyers! This is the Office of Presidential Counsel. This is the office of Don McGann, essentially. That’s the counsel’s office. That’s the official counselor to the president.

“White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.” She requested their identities. She, in other words, demanded that they be unmasked so she could find out who they were. You put this together with Evelyn Farkas, who appeared on MSNBC on March the 2nd pretty much admitting all of this, that they were gathering the evidence.

They were preserving the evidence. They didn’t trust the Trump administration not to throw it all away; so they decided to leak it. “The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on ‘unmasking’ the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally.” The New York Times has also reported this back in January! They’ve used the word “wiretaps.” They’ve used the word “incidentally.”

To review briefly, here’s what happens. An intelligence agency — take your pick: CIA, NSA, DIA, you name it — survivals foreign actors, nations, individuals, spies. In this case, in this example, the Russian ambassador is survived; his phone calls are tapped. The Russian ambassador knows it. This is standard operating procedure standard. They survival us in Moscow, or try. Statecraft, it’s what happens. Nothing illegal about that. That’s what Devin Nunes meant when he said that what he had seen at the Old Executive Office Building, there was nothing illegal about it, because the surveillance was not targeting Americans. It was targeting Russians. So they’re surveilling the Russian ambassador.

You’re tapping his phone, and in the process you overhear conversations that he’s having with, say, Michael Flynn of the Trump transition team. When that happens, those transcribing this call are supposed to not identity the American involved, instead referring to him as “American number one.” If there’s another American in the same call, that would be called “American number two” and so on. The name is not revealed nor are the details of what the American says because the American isn’t the target.

That’s where the Obama administration steps in. Susan Rice asked for the American in these calls to be unmasked so that she and Obama and Valerie Jarrett and probably the whole kit and caboodle would know who was saying what was said on these calls. The interesting thing is the backtrack. Since they’ve had… And there’s a tape of this call between the Russian ambassador and Flynn.

If Flynn had indeed promised anything about lifting sanctions once Trump was inaugurated, they wouldn’t have reported that by now. It is clear that Flynn did not do anything actionable because all they’ve been able to do is leak supposition and create mystery about it. But they’ve known all along that nothing happened! They’ve known all along that Flynn didn’t do anything illegal in his conversation with the Russian ambassador. So the leaks have been intended to create suspicion rather than allay it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Quickly back to the Eli Lake piece: “The pattern of” the requests made by Susan Rice of the Obama administration to unmask all of these Americans in this treasure trove of wiretapped intelligence and retrieved intelligence “was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on ‘unmasking’ the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally.”

Last week, there were a number of Republicans who were going against the grain and saying the NSA had a bombshell coming. Do you remember that? Immediately there were people who were distrustful of it because the NSA and the FBI and the CIA are all perceived to be part of the Obama deep state, where a number of Obama embeds and holdovers remain attempting to sabotage both the Trump transition and the Trump presidency.

But it turns out that the NSA did indeed have a bombshell. Somebody there — a whistleblower, somebody — revealed that it was Susan Rice who was requesting that all of these Americans incidentally caught up in foreign surveillance be unmasked, and it has to be agents of the Obama administration (which we know instinctively) who were leaking all of this to the media. But it gets even better.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We are in the middle of a blockbuster piece of news that the mainstream still sits on. They still have not reported this. Now, I want to go back to the Eli Lake piece, this one allusion here that “[T]he pattern of [Susan] Rice’s requests” that Americans incidentally caught an intelligence and surveillance of others — the unmasked and identified — again, were “discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on ‘unmasking’ the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets…”

She was instrumental in this.

And we know the National Security Council probably by way of the NSA, but regardless. “The news about Rice also sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks.” Now, remember how his behavior’s been characterized by the media: treasonous, unfair, cheating, that Devin Nunes secretly — under the cover of darkness — snuck into the White House grounds to take a look at intelligence that only he saw, and he didn’t share it with his counterpart, Adam Schiff, on the Intelligence Committee.

And this is unseemly, and he should recuse himself, and he should resign from the committee, and he maybe should even leave his office as a member of the House of Representatives. Now, it emerged last week that Nunes went to the White House last month, the night before he made an allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time, he said he needed to go to the White House because reports were only on a database for the executive branch. I covered this last week. The National Security Council is in the Executive Office Building on the fourth floor, and nothing leaves there because it’s securely maintained there.

You want to see it; you go there. Nunes went there. It now appears that Nunes needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice’s requests to unmask Americans. That’s what he saw. That is what led to him alluding to the fact that the president was correct that he had been surveilled. Remember, unmasking — in this case, identifying Americans incidentally caught up in the surveillance of others — effectively means Americans are being surveilled. And in fact, I’ll go so… I want to repeat an allegation. Well, not quite an allegation.

I want to repeat a possibility that I mentioned, and it is this: That the Obama administration chose surveillance targets knowing that they would be talking to specific Americans, wanting to see what those specific Americans were talking about. So while they couldn’t get a FISA warrant to target Americans, they purposely targeted for surveillance foreign actors that they knew Trump transition people would be talking to and learned what they were saying that way. And that’s why Rice was requesting that these people be unmasked so that she and Obama and whoever else in this operation would understand who was being talked about and who was saying what.

Now, this brings us back to Pencil Neck, Adam Schiff. The ranking Democrat on the committee that Nunes chairs just had a gasket blown. He went nuts, claiming that the Democrats on the committee were being left out, that we shouldn’t trust what Nunes was saying. He might be making it up, that this was unseemly; it should not be tolerated. So he went up there; he viewed these reports on Friday. And in comments to the press over the weekend, he declined to discuss them, but he said “no evidence.”

After last week, earlier, claiming to have proof now that there was collusion between the Russians and Trump, Pencil Neck went on the Sunday shows and had to totally back out of that. And he’s reduced to once again saying (summarized), “We don’t have evidence of anything. That’s why we need to keep looking.” There isn’t evidence of anything that has been charged. The scandal here is not Trump. The scandal is not Trump and the Russians. The scandal is the Obama administration and these embeds in the deep state surveilling targets with the express purpose of hoping to capture Americans as part of the surveillance.

And as Eli Lake says, “[M]uch about this is highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then certainly how and why it was disseminated.” So Nunes is looking to be the exact opposite of the way the media portrayed him. Nunes was actually trying to get to the bottom of this and found out how deep the bottom is. Well, let’s go to the Schiff. From State of the Union on CNN Sunday morning. Jake Tapper: Congressman Pencil Neck, “The big issue is whether or not there was collusion among members of the Trump campaign or Trump advisers.

“Can you definitely say that there was collusion, that there were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who were working with the Russians to time the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that had been hacked either from John Podesta or the DNC?” That’s the entire Democrat case right there. That is it summed up. That is what they want everybody to believe. That’s what this lunatic Tom Perez, the new chairman of the DNC, said at a rally in Newark over the weekend, “Trump didn’t win the presidency.

“Trump and the Republicans don’t give an [excrement] about people.” The guy went off the rails. He made this militant Islamist Keith Ellison look mild-mannered by nature. Ellison was second in the voting for chairman of the DNC. This Perez guy is just an uber-partisan, and was just off the rails. And this is it, but they believe… You know what, folks? They know all of this is made up. Although they are so off the rails, I think they’ve bought their own lie and series of lies for so long now that they actually probably believe it happened.

There isn’t any evidence whatsoever.

There has never been any evidence that voters were tampered with. Nobody’s even alleged that. There was never any evidence whatsoever. And look at what the Democrats are admitting, if their version of events actually happened: That the Russians were able to plant fake news and that the Russians hacked Podesta and that the Russians got to WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks released all the emails. Look at what they’re asking us to believe: that the Russians were able to outsmart the American voter, that the Russians were able to screw with the minds of the American voter and make them vote against Democrats.

The Democrats are portraying themselves as weak, ineffective, and incompetent as they attempt to make the case that Russian collusion with Trump stole the election from them. So here is Schiff answering that question from Jake Tapper. (summarized) “Do you have any evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign, Trump advisers and Russia? Can you definitively say there was collusion? Can you say that this resulted in Hillary losing the election?”

SCHIFF: I — I don’t think we can say anything definitively at this point. Uh, we are still it he very early stage of the investigation. The only thing I can say that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this. We really need to find out exactly what the Russians did, because one of the most important conclusions that the Intelligence Committee reached is that they are gonna do this again to the United States. They’re doing it already in Europe. So we can say, y’know, conclusively: This is something that needs to be thoroughly investigated. Uh, but it — but it’s way premature to be reaching conclusions.

RUSH: Really? He had just reached a conclusion a few days earlier when he went out and said that there was evidence of collusion. He had to pull it back because there isn’t any. This is gonna blow up on ’em. The media’s gonna cover for ’em when it happens, I understand, but it’s gonna blow up on them. This is going to be… Gorsuch is gonna blow up on ’em too.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: How many of you in the audience think that the Democrats actually believe they can force Trump out of office and that that’s why they are doing this? Think about that, will you? I’m gonna address that as we dig even deeper into this unmasking story, this blockbuster. Hang on. Be right back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Tony in Berlin, Maryland. Hi, Tony, you’re on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.

CALLER: How you doing, Rush? Good to talk to you after 25 years of trying, finally got through.

RUSH: I’m glad you did, sir.

CALLER: Got a lot saved up, but to go to the item of the moment, it’s curious to me that if the Obama administration were surveilling Trump during the campaign, that they wouldn’t be surveilling all the top candidates early on too. So why isn’t some Republican asking the intelligence community as to were they, in fact, surveilling other Republican candidates during the campaign?

RUSH: I suspect that somebody may know that already.

CALLER: Obviously NSA knows it, ’cause they’ve got him on tape.

RUSH: Well, theoretically. What we know is that Susan Rice — the bombshell today, just to repeat — I haven’t talk about this since the first half hour of the program — the bombshell today, maybe I should go through this again. The intelligence agency, NSA, was surveilling the Russian ambassador and all kinds of other foreign actors, which is legal and normal.

And in the process, any Americans they talk to on the phone or in person is going to be captured. When Americans are captured while foreign actors are being targeted, the American capture is called incidental. It’s not targeted and therefore not usable. The Americans in such instances are never identified, other than “American number 1,” “American number 2,” however many in the conversation.

The bombshell today, Susan Rice, who lied on five different Sunday shows about Benghazi, as video being responsible for it, is the Obama official who asked that those Americans be identified — i.e., unmasked — and those names were then made public and information in those phone calls that had been surveilled were leaked, and that’s how we get the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN stories all through November, December, and January. And so what it means is that not only was Trump being surveilled, we know the surveillance was going on all through the summer. The surveillance was going on even before Trump was the nominee.

So we know that Trump was being surveilled. Not in a direct way. This is the trick. The trick is if you’re Obama and you want to find out what Trump’s saying, doing, or whatever, or anybody, you target people they’re talking to. If Trump wins, his transition team has to talk to the Russians and every other nation that we do business with. So you target those people, and then you surveil and you find out what Trump people are talking to which target and what they’re saying.

Now, process, were they surveilling, did they pick up calls that the Russian ambassador might have had with Cruz or what have you. Haven’t heard any of that, but reason would tell us that they Hoovered up quite a lot.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ll tell you, Fox News was early on in this news about an Obama administration official being responsible for the unmasking of Americans incidentally surveilled such as Mike Flynn and others, and he started tweeting things out on March 31st. For example: “Our sources say this surveillance that led to the unmasking of private names of American citizens started before Trump was the GOP nominee.” “Our sources say the person who did the unmasking is very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world. Is not the FBI.”

That person’s now been identified as Susan Rice.

It’s not James Comey, in other words.

It’s Susan Rice who was identified as the person who did the unmasking for political purposes. They wanted to know who the incidentals were for political purposes. Adam Housley at Fox: “…unmasking of these names of private citizens, but the spreading of these names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security.” Another tweet: “Our sources: ‘It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team.'” “I will also note,” Mr. Housley said, “My sources are not Trump people.” They are just frustrated with the politicization of our intelligence agencies. Here is this morning. Brian Kilmeade says, “Tell us about the story that may have changed the story.”

HOUSLEY: What we’ve learned is this from multiple sources, is that it’s all about intelligence-gathering methods. The fact is a lot of these men and women in the intelligence community did not want to speak about what’s next going on because they were concerned about those methods being known. But now they figure they might as well at least clarify things, since Nunes has been leaked to by someone they don’t know — or at least, they tell me they don’t know. We know that there was this: This was electronic surveillance of Trump and the people close to Donald Trump, including some supporters, for up to a year before inauguration. That information was disseminated, we’re told, through NSA channels. It’s unprecedented the way this was done.

RUSH: Trump! Was! Right! When he threw that grenade back at them, it blew up in their faces. They’re not used to people fighting back against the media onslaught like this. They’re used to people resigning. Adam Housley was not finished.

HOUSLEY: This unmasked information — these names of Americans who had done nothing wrong — was disseminated to all the NSC, some at DOD, Clapper, Brennan, basically the people at the top. They also say, I’m told, that Rice knew about this possibly as well. Now, I know some reports are out there that she was the one that reported this. We do not know who reported this, because we have not spoken to Devin Nunes about it. So we don’t know what papers he saw. Our sources don’t know what papers he saw. They just tell me the information about unmasking names from Donald Trump and his team and his family was disseminated to a very select few at the top and was done so for a significant amount of time — and that is blockbuster, guys.

RUSH: Right, and those are the intel they took to the media. Now, let’s bring Nunes back into this. Nunes goes to the White House. He goes to the Executive Office Building, fourth floor, National Security Council. They have up there all of this. He looks at it. He then calls a press conference and announces what he’s seen and tells he’s taking it up and explaining it to Trump. And essentially it’s this: There was legal surveillances, and it had nothing to do with Russia.

There was legal surveillance of Russians and other foreign actors, and what he learned was that the Americans — those Russians and others surveilled people were talking to, those Americans — were asked to be identified by the Obama administration. They were unmasked for political purposes. He thought Trump should know this. So he tells Trump this. Next thing that happens is that Pencil Neck, Adam Schiff, blows a gasket claiming that Nunes has no right to be doing that. He should have shared what he learned with the committee and with the Democrats on the committee.

And therefore, Nunes should recuse himself. And therefore, Nunes should resign. And therefore, Nunes should commit hara-kiri. And therefore, Nunes should resign from the House. And therefore, Nunes should apologize for being born. And therefore, Nunes should leave the country. Then Pencil Neck went up there and looked at it himself. Now, in the midst of all this, Pencil Neck said that he knew there was collusion between Russia and Trump. He couldn’t contain himself! He so desperately wants this to be found that he prematurely spoke.

Then Nunes paved the way for Pencil Neck to go up there and see the same stuff Nunes saw. So Schiff goes up there thinking that they’ve got Nunes, because Nunes saw stuff he shouldn’t have seen and then released it prematurely in ways he shouldn’t have. And then Pencil Neck saw it, and shows up on Sunday shows and withdraws or retracts this idea that there’s proof of collusion and says (paraphrased), “There isn’t and we’re back to square one. We don’t know anything, and that’s why we need to keep investigating.”

Folks, there isn’t anything here. This story is not Trump and the Russians. I’m sorry to be so repetitive. The story is the surveillance that the Obama administration was engaging in of Trump and who knows who else. Now, you say, “Rush, this is awfully hard to believe.” No, it isn’t. This is my point about liberals and who they are. They weaponized the IRS against conservatives, didn’t they? They most certainly did.

They have done any number of things, take over police departments on the basis that they’re racist after things like what happened in Ferguson or in Baltimore. The idea that people who are closely associated with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn would not surveil their enemies. It’s much easier to believe that it would happen. This is why liberals want power. This is the kind of thing they want to be able to do with it. So it’s not by any stretch hard to believe for me.